DETAILED ACTION
The instant application having Application No. 18/469385 filed on 09/28/2023 is presented for examination by the examiner.
Claim 1-8 is/are pending in the application.
Claims 1 and 7-8 is/are independent claims.
Notice of Pre-AIA or AIA Status
The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA .
Examiner Notes
Examiner cites particular columns and line numbers in the references as applied to the claims below for the convenience of the applicant. Although the specified citations are representative of the teachings in the art and are applied to the specific limitations within the individual claim, other passages and figures may apply as well. It is respectfully requested that, in preparing responses, the applicant fully consider the references in entirety as potentially teaching all or part of the claimed invention, as well as the context of the passage as taught by the prior art or disclosed by the examiner.
Priority
As required by M.P.E.P. 201.14(c), acknowledgement is made of applicant’s claim for priority based on applications filed on 01/18/2023.
Drawings
The applicant’s drawings submitted are acceptable for examination purposes.
Information Disclosure Statement
As required by M.P.E.P. 609, the applicant’s submissions of the Information Disclosure Statement dated 09/18/2023 is acknowledged by the examiner and the cited references have been considered in the examination of the claims now pending.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 101
35 U.S.C. 101 reads as follows:
Whoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent therefor, subject to the conditions and requirements of this title.
Claims 1-8 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 101 because the claimed invention is directed to non-statutory subject matter.
Claims 1-8, the claims are within at least one of the four categories of patent eligible subject matter as it is directing to an apparatus/method/medium claims under Step 1. However, claim 1-8 are/is rejected under 35 USC 101 because the claims are/is directed to an abstract idea without being integrated into a practical application nor being significantly more.
Per claims 1, 7 and 8, the limitations “accept, when deploying the processing clusters, …”, “specify, based on the requirement for the processing cluster node …”, and “specify one or more placement group …” as drafted, recite functions that, under its broadest reasonable interpretation, covers functions that could reasonably be performed in the mind, including with the aid of pen and paper, but for the recitation of generic computer components. That is, the limitation “accept, when deploying the processing clusters, …”, “specify, based on the requirement for the processing cluster node …” as drafted, are functions that, under its broadest reasonable interpretation, recite the abstract idea of a mental process. The limitations encompass a human mind carrying out the functions through observation, evaluation, judgment and /or opinion, or even with the aid of pen and paper. Thus, these limitations recite and fall within the “Mental Processes” grouping of abstract ideas under Prong 1 Step 2A.
Under Prong 2 Step 2A, this judicial exception is not integrated into a practical application. The claim recites the following additional elements “a processor”, “a computer”, non-transitory storage medium”, “transmit node specific information …” and “transmit information on the specific placement group …” The “a processor”, “a computer”, and non-transitory storage medium” are recited at a high-level of generality such that it amounts no more than mere instructions to apply the exception using a generic computer component, or merely a generic computer or generic computer components to perform the judicial exception. The addition elements “transmit node specific information …” and “transmit information on the specific placement group …” amounts to data gathering which is considered to be insignificant extra solution activity (MPEP 2106.05(g). Accordingly, the additional elements do not integrate the recited judicial exception into a practical application, and the claim is therefore directed to the judicial exception. See MPEP 2106.05(f).
Under Step 2B, The claims do not include additional elements that are sufficient to amount to significantly more than the judicial exception. As discussed above with respect to integration of the abstract idea into a practical application, the additional elements are “a processor”, “a computer”, “non-transitory storage medium”, “transmit node specific information …” and “transmit information on the specific placement group …” the mere use of generic computer to implement the abstract idea, as discussed above, which does not amount to significantly more, thus, not an inventive concept, and the courts have identified gathering data, storing data, and outputting the result is well-understood, routine and conventional activity (Berkheimer v. HP, Inc., 881 F.3d 1360, 1368, 125 USPQ2d 1649, 1654 (Fed. Cir. 2018)), thus, cannot amount to an inventive concept.. Accordingly, the claim does not appear to be patent eligible under 35 USC 101. See MPEP 2106.05(d).
Regarding claim 2, under prong 2, the “the processor is configured to incorporate the node specific information into a manifest to comply with when the container cluster deploys the processing cluster and transmit the manifest to the container cluster” limitations are additional elements that recite insignificant extra solution activity which do not amount to a practical application, nor amount to significantly more under step 2B as explained above.
Regarding claim 3, the limitation “wherein the requirement for the processing cluster node includes an essential condition that is a condition to be essential and a preferential condition that is a non-essential but a prioritized condition” and “the processor is configured to specify, with respect to container cluster nodes” are an additional metal process under prong 1.
Regarding claim 4, the limitation “specify, when a change of a container cluster node where the processing cluster node is to run is detected” is an additional metal process under prong 1. Under prong 2, the “transmit information of the specified placement group to the processing cluster as information for determining” limitations are additional elements that recite insignificant extra solution activity which do not amount to a practical application, nor amount to significantly more under step 2B as explained above.
Regarding claim 5, the limitation “wherein the container cluster node within the predetermined range is a container cluster node belonging to a same availability zone” is an additional metal process under prong 1.
Regarding claim 6, under prong 2, the “cause a storage apparatus to store information of the placement group”, and “receive processing cluster identification information that indicates a predetermined processing cluster from a predetermined request source and transmit” limitations are additional elements that recite insignificant extra solution activity which do not amount to a practical application, nor amount to significantly more under step 2B as explained above.
Allowable Subject Matter
Claims 1-8 would be allowable if rewritten to overcome the rejection(s) under 101, set forth in this Office action.
The following prior art made of record and not relied upon is cited to establish the level of skill in the applicant’s art and those arts considered reasonably pertinent to applicant’s disclosure. See MPEP 707.05(c).
Prior arts:
US 2023/0205509 to Baral
In some implementations, planning the deployment may involve determining one or more deployment parameters, such as ordering of the clusters (i.e., which clusters should be deployed to first versus which clusters should be deployed to later), the number of clusters to deploy concurrently (i.e., batch size), completion percentage (i.e., what percentage of clusters in a group should be completed before advancing deployment to the next group), bake time (i.e., how long to wait before advancing deployment to the next group), etc.
US 2021/0406088 to Chen
Although not shown in FIG. 1, other clusters 102b, . . . , 102n of compute nodes may similarly deploy respective orchestrators 140 to deploy virtualized and/or distributed compute services on different nodes of the respective clusters 102b, . . . , 102n. As described in further detail below, a federated operator component 101 may communicate with clusters 102a, 102b, . . . , 102n and may deploy and manage compute services across multiple clusters. In addition, federated operator component 101 may define a mesh network for routing inter-cluster communication to enable compute resources that are part of the same compute service, but which are deployed on different clusters, to communicate with one another. Additionally, to ensure trusted and/or secure communication federated operator component 101 may obtain access credentials and/or signed security certificates and may provision such credentials to different clusters to enable inter-cluster communication.
US 2019/0235978 to Wu
Briefly summarized and as will be described in more detail, the invention affords a new multi-tier data cluster architecture having hierarchical membership of heterogeneous cluster nodes at multiple cluster levels corresponding to the multiple data tiers having multiple failover domains comprising groups or clusters of nodes (as will be described more fully below) at each data tier. Each group of nodes comprising a failover domain can serve a specific data tier. The multi-tier cluster supports a global namespace across the entire cluster, including across data tiers and node groups, and this namespace may be exposed to a user to facilitate backup and management of the multiple tiers as a single file system.
US 2018/0135993 to Thangaraj
Thereafter, the application server 114 may be configured to group one or more landmarks into a cluster, such that the one or more landmarks in the cluster are within the first pre-determined distance from each other. Thus, the application server 114 may be configured to determine the plurality of clusters by grouping the plurality of landmarks. In an embodiment, the application server 114 may be configured to formulate a minimization problem for determining the plurality of clusters. The plurality of grids, the plurality of landmarks, and the plurality of clusters, collectively, form the multi-tier location data. In an embodiment, the application server 114 may be configured to store the multi-tier location data in the database server 112.
US 2023/0121268 to Mueller
Software application containerization separates node configuration instructions from the code instructions for executing the underlying containerized software application (e.g., 4G EPC S-GW or P-GW, 5G core network functions, eNodeB functions, or gNodeB functions), allowing users to deploy the underlying containerized software application to any number of computing clusters or nodes. As software containerization has gained popularity, containerized application deployment tools, such as container-orchestration systems for automating computing application deployment, scaling, and management across several nodes or several clusters have emerged.
US 2020/0342297 to Dai
In a possible implementation, the second node cluster includes k second computing nodes, and any one of the k first node clusters includes k first computing nodes, and in any minimum tree in the network structure, the k second computing nodes in the second node cluster one-to-one correspond to the k first node clusters, and any one of the k second computing nodes is connected to the k first computing nodes in the corresponding first node cluster through the physical link.
US 2020/0311077 to Zhang
In some examples, performing the prioritized breadth-first search includes maintaining a priority queue of candidate cluster centroids prioritized based on geometric distance from the query vector, and until a stopping condition is met, adding a plurality of cluster centroids to the priority queue. After the stopping condition is met, one or more best cluster centroids are returned, based on position in the priority queue.
US 2015/0378765 to Singh
Examples disclosed herein include a pool manager to create a pool of virtual machines that are provisioned and may be readily fetched during a scale-out operation. The pool of virtual machines may be provisioned during a first deployment of the application, during a first scale-out operation, or may be created prior to deploying the application. Examples disclosed herein may customize the virtual machines in the pools based on client preferences. Once configured, the virtual machines in the pools are placed in a suspended-state until fetched during a scale-out operation.
US 2013/0198424 to Randhawa
The load balancing architecture considers cluster-wide I/O load characteristics for each of the hosts/nodes in a cluster capable of accessing a storage system. As a result, the architecture provides superior load balancing that a load balancing scheme limited to the multi-pathing layer cannot handle. Specifically, the load balancing architecture considers differential cluster-wide I/O characteristics in relation to a local host to load balance I/O handling by local or remote paths. As such, load balancing occurs across a set of hosts/nodes of a cluster. Further, existing mechanisms are used to load balance or schedule at the local level.
The prior art of record does not disclose and/or fairly suggest at least claimed limitations recited in such manners in independent claim 1 "... accept, when deploying the processing clusters, with respect to each of the plurality of processing clusters, deployment request information including a requirement for a processing cluster node that configures the processing cluster and a designation of a related cluster, which is another processing cluster having a coupling relationship with the processing cluster; specify, based on the requirement for the processing cluster node and a requirement for a processing cluster node that configures the related cluster, one or more container cluster nodes, which are a node of a container cluster that conforms to the requirements; transmit node specific information that indicates the specified container cluster node to the container cluster as cluster policy information for determining a container cluster node to which the processing cluster is to be deployed in the container cluster on which the processing cluster is to be deployed; specify one or more placement groups, which are groups of processing cluster nodes that run on a container cluster node within a predetermined range from a container cluster node on which the processing cluster node of the processing cluster and the processing cluster node of the related cluster run …” and similarly recited in such manners in other independent claims 7-8.
Conclusion
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to Tuan Dao whose telephone number is (571) 270 3387. The examiner can normally be reached on Monday to Friday from 09am to 05pm. The examiner can also be reached on alternate Fridays.
If attempts to reach the examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the examiner’s supervisor, Pierre Vital, can be reached at telephone number (571) 272 4215. The fax phone number for the organization where this application or proceeding is assigned is 571-273-8300.
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/TUAN C DAO/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2198